Dear BDD Addicts,

In Hungarian the summer period is often referred to as “Cucumber-season”, because this is the time when not too much happens for the business, only cucumber grows. Well. This is probably exactly which happened in June, but this is not a bad news at all for cucumber and bdd friends. The iconic CukeUp! conference returned with a new format to London and it has been extended by related events to a full week CukenFest! It is over now, but stay tuned for the news for the next year.

Last year we started to work on a SpecFlow book with Seb Rose. Now we reached an important milestone, because we decided to publish the first part of the book, which discusses the collaboration and discovery aspect of bdd in a tool agnostic way. This first mini-book, “BDD Books: Discovery – Explore behaviour using examples” will be announced at the Agile 2017 conference in August. You can check the LeanPub book page at http://bddbooks.com and sign up to receive news. New SpecFlow course dates have been announced too!

But now, the monthly dose…

Given a box of cukes… Cookies at CukeUp 2017

[Process] Everyone Wins

“How do you measure the time spent for BDD?” — This is a question that I often receive and as you can guess, it does not make sense spending the time to answer it, because its existence shows a bigger problem: the team (or the management) sees bdd as an overhead. BDD is not an overhead, but a solution for making the software delivery more efficient. It should make it faster, not slower! Andy Knight produces quality posts about bdd in his Automation Panda blog. In the post I’ve included in the newsletter, he is talking about the ways how to gain trust and win support for bdd.

[Process] They’re called different things

Liz’s post is pretty old, but still an interesting reading. You are reading the BDD Addict newsletter and not the ATDD or SbE (Specification by Example) Addict newsletter. Although they are all related to the same thing and if done right they are pretty similar, but still, Behavior Driven Development is the term that I like the best to describe how software development can be supported by exploring the domain using examples, building a living documentation using the ubiquitous language and ensure the confidence in quality using test automation. So what’s the difference? “They’re called different things” as the often quoted answer says in Liz’s post. Make sure you read it.

[Gherkin] Checklist for good scenarios

Probably everyone who practices writing Gherkin scenarios and helps others to follow this way has their own checklist of things one should watch for. Not everyone writes them down though and not everyone shares it with others. Thomas Sundberg belongs to the sharing group. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Thomas!

All other time: Let’s have a coffee together! Ping me on twitter: @gasparnagy

See you in Orlando, 7th-10th August 2017!

[News] SpecFlow v2.2 Released

One of our next big step with SpecFlow is to provide support for .NET Core. We are still not there, but we have made a big step towards it with v2.2 that we released in June. This version contains the necessary infrastructure to make better experiments with .NET Core (e.g. allowing to provide SpecFlow configuration in a JSON file) and also some other handy improvements like allowing to inject parameters to hooks, improved support for xUnit2 and the TestThreadContext for managing test-thread related state for parallel execution. Thanks for all contributors! See the details in the announcement post. Recently, Pickles, SpecFlow+ and SpecSync have had new releases too!

[Video:Test Automation] Property Based BDD Examples

Last year I included a post about the ways how to combine Behavior Driven Development with Property Based Testing. Skills Matter shared the video of my lightening talk about this topic, so you can get the essence of it in 14 minutes.

The Call for Papers is now open for Agile Testing & BDD 2017! Find out more and submit your talk here.